By Thomas L. Krannawitter
What an odd time to be alive: Information is more available now than at any earlier moment in human history, and yet few people seem interested in learning. Many prefer cheering. Americans in 2025 are, in important respects, less knowledgeable about the world and about themselves than Americans were in 1925. Or 1825.
In 1787 Alexander Hamilton launched a series of essays, which came to be known as The Federalist Papers, under the pseudonym Publius, a classical signal ordinary citizens of the period readily understood (Publius Valerius Publicola, a founder of the Roman republic).
Today even well-educated Americans, including many with advanced university degrees, cannot recognize the reference; instead they indulge a schoolboy snicker because the name sounds like “pubic.” Latin is a joke and Rome a relic. Historical knowledge and the wisdom based upon it have been squandered.
Shallow out, shallow in
It is not only history that Americans largely neglect; many do not understand themselves. The dominant postmodern posture treats claims about the good as mere competing preferences and prejudices—contingent cultural or personal perspectives with no claim to objective truth. Americans assume, without questioning or investigating, that no way of life can be said to be objectively right or wrong; moral judgment is reduced to taste and fashion, not unlike ice cream flavors.
From that premise follows a paradox we see everywhere: a moralism that proclaims universal love and inclusivity from the very people consumed by hatred for political rivals.
Many avow that they “love everyone” and therefore hate no one, yet their public life degenerates into a succession of furious exclusions—an energetic policing of who is to be honored and who must be shamed. A female model with a pretty face and a petite figure can become public enemy #1 overnight simply for donning jeans in an ad with a clever tagline. The result is a culture in which performance substitutes for principle and indignation stands in for moral argument.
Just look around. People who cannot formulate a coherent moral argument—because they reject the very possibility of a moral principle—are so quick to vent their hatred for the current President of the United States (especially after he switched from D to R). According to their own estimation, their indignation is conclusive proof of their moral righteousness. We might also observe that for nihilists, they seem quite angry.
Such moral shallowness is anti-intellectual. It is anti-philosophic. It is unserious. And it is a ridiculous mockery of the Socratic challenge to know thyself, which begins by knowing what it means to be human.
Why, then, do so many know so little in an age when access to information and the accumulated wisdom found in the study of history is unprecedented?
Work
Because learning is work. Real understanding—far more demanding than the memorization of facts—is an active intellectual exercise. It requires attention, patience, the capacity for sustained thought, the courage to be corrected, and the habit of testing received opinions against evidence and argument.
Instead of treating our technological condition as an unparalleled occasion for education, many Americans treat it as an occasion for affirmation. They form partisan hermitages: You are either with my clan or you are not. Whether you are right or wrong is immaterial; what matters is whether you cheer with us or against us. Insight, wisdom, intellectual rigor—these qualities take a back seat to allegiance and applause.
This is not a new human failing. It is, in essence, tribalism—ancient, ineradicable, and all-too-human. But the form tribalism takes today is distinctive: it is branded as information consumption. Yet, that’s not what it is.
Tribalism
Human beings are, and always have been, tribal animals. The novelty lies in the instruments of our tribalism. Mass media, now amplified and algorithmically optimized by social platforms, transforms applause into currency.
Likes, emojis, and instant outrage create feedback loops that reward spectacle and punish solitary thought. Media firms and platform designers have merely monetized an old instinct.
Few dare to stand alone. It is easier, psychologically and commercially, to join a faction and echo its enthusiasms and hatreds. From faction arises conformity; from conformity, intellectual stagnation.
Still. tribalism is not destiny. Truth exists; it is not a matter of taste. Anyone with curiosity, discipline, and the willingness to think, alone if need be, can discover truth. Socrates did, and we have more in our favor than he did. The modest good news is the one with which I began: More information is available to more people than ever before.
The question is therefore straightforward and urgent. Will we use this abundance of information to learn, to think, and to seek the true? Or will we use it to cheer, lending our voices and attention to whatever spectacle happens to excite the herd we prefer?
When Hamilton decided to publish The Federalist as a two-volume book, he added a short preface to Volume I, in which he concluded: “The great wish is that [The Federalist in book form] may promote the cause of truth, and lead to a right judgment of the true interests of the community.”
His premises, clearly, were 1) that truth exists and can be discovered by thinking minds, and 2) that people sometimes form a false judgment—they can be mistaken—about their “true interests.” Might we agree with Hamilton’s premises? Or shall we assume that truth is impossible; that a person’s interests are whatever fleeting feelings he or she experiences in the moment; and that all that really matters is finding a tribe that cheers for the same things we cheer, and mocks the same things we mock?
Dr. Thomas L. Krannawitter is the founding president of Waypoints—a teaching system for high schools based on primary source documents and key ideas of liberty—and proprietor of the Substack Zetetic Questions.
